Here is an interesting presentation of the results/positioning of Viking, the wildly successful hedge fund run by Andreas Halvorsen ’86, Williams trustee and billionaire.

See the link for more details. Comments:

1) The Eph Business Association (EBA) ought to do a better job of forging connections between Williams students and prominent alumni like Halvorsen. (By the way, having talked to some of their leaders, I can confirm that the EBA is an impressive organization. Students with any interest in finance/business ought to join.) One way would be to have a small group that followed each major Eph firm and commented on their public material. EphBlog would be eager to host such a group here.

2) There is a great thesis to be written, in either economics or history, about the rise of Viking, an interesting story in-and-of-itself but also emblematic of the changing landscape of finance over the last 25 years.

Read the story (pdf) of the undergraduate fight over a Hitler effigy in 1938.

Adolf Hitler, in brown-shirted effigy, disappeared suddenly from the Williams College campus this evening as a group of pro-fascist conservatives made off with the image of Der Fuehrer which has been prepared for destruction at the stake.

There is a great senior thesis to be written about Williams in the 30’s. Who will write it?

Rev. Eusden, the Nathan Jackson professor of Christian theology emeritus at Williams, died in Parkview Adventist Medical Center in Brunswick, Maine, on April 27 of complications of an infection. He was 90 and had moved from Williamstown to Brunswick in 2010.

“John was a large presence at Williams in more ways than one,” Adam Falk, president of Williams College, wrote in a message to the campus. “While the tall, former Harvard swim captain and former Marine ­pilot loomed forcefully from the pulpit, he also helped lead the college into engagement with the civil rights movement, ecumenical and interfaith initiatives, international studies, and environmentalism.”

College announcement here. In Eusden’s generation, a majority of faculty had served in the US military. Is there a single veteran on the faculty today?

Minor note: You are not a “pilot” in the Marine Corps. You are a “naval aviator.” Bizarrely, I can’t find any link to justify this claim on the web. But it must be true! Perhaps it was not true in Eusden’s day? Help us out, ex-Marine readers!

Two years after hosting the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Williams College campus, the Rev. John Eusden followed his friend to Birmingham, Ala., in 1963 during one of the most hostile times of the civil rights movement.

Far from his chaplaincy at Williams, Rev. Eusden was jailed in Birmingham, where he participated in demonstrations, facing attack dogs, hurled curses, and the fire hoses officials trained on protesters.

“I told him then that if he ­ever needed me, to just give me a call,” Rev. Eusden told the Globe in May 1963, speaking of a promise he made during King’s visit to Williams. “Well, the call came.”

Eusden’s involvement in the Civil Rights movement might not, by itself, merit a senior thesis. But, surely, the story of all the grads of Williams, the parts they played, the stands they took (and failed to take) would.

Rev. Eusden “made the membranes permeable between the religions of the West and the religions of the East by virtue of his intellectual appetite, his scholarly projects, and his practice,” said the Rev. Rick Spalding, the current chaplain at Williams. “He was a very serious meditator.”

He added that through ­social justice work and participation in the civil rights movement, often with the Rev. ­William Sloane Coffin, Rev. Eusden also “deserves credit for helping shape what I would call contemporary college chaplaincy.”

Hmmm. For good or for ill? At EphBlog, we love Rick Spalding, but the changes in the roll of college chaplain over the last 50 years are not good. The most important one is that the chaplain is no longer a member of the faculty. The more that important college offices are filled by faculty members, the better.

At Harvard College, from which he graduated as part of the class of 1944, he was captain of the swim team and managed what was reported then to be the unprecedented feat of lettering in swimming at three universities, when military training took him to Yale and Colgate.

Back in the day, this story was always told with regard to Eusden being the only person to letter at both Harvard and Yale. Colgate was generally left out . . .

During World War II, he was a Marine aviator and afterward spent two semesters at Harvard Law School before leaving for Yale Divinity School, from which he graduated in 1949. He earned a doctorate in religion at Yale in 1954 and began teaching. He was ordained in his ­father’s church in 1949 and the following year married Joanne Reiman, who had lived around the corner during his Newton childhood and became a psycho­therapist.

There is a fair amount of Williams history associated with Newton, Massachusetts. Who will write a thesis with that theme?

A skier who liked to spend at least 100 days on the slopes each year, he called his 70s his “late middle age” and was still competing in bicycle races into his 80s.

“The nice thing about an ‘elder age group’ is that the entries are few – sometimes only me,” he wrote in 1994, “and so to win the age group all I have to do is start!”

Who’s the best public speaker at Williams College? It’s a contentious question, but regardless of whom you ask, Professor Steven Fix’s name is likely to be in the mix.

Among his colleagues, he is known for timing his lectures down to the second— literally. He once told a beginning English professor, “That was an excellent lecture, but you’re running twenty-three seconds too long.” Among his students, Fix is known for delivering such moving lectures as to reduce students to tears, even when those lectures concern authors as obscure as Samuel Johnson—one of his personal favorites.

Besides his speaking engagements in the English department, Fix is also the college’s Phi Beta Kappa Chapter Historian, and it falls to him to deliver the history of the Society at Williams each year, on the day before graduation. So, on June 7, 2014, Professor Fix delivered a rousing rendition of the history of Phi Beta Kappa, much to the delight of the audience who, having been awakened for the 8:30 a.m. event, needed some rousing.

“The history of Phi Beta Kappa at Williams is a history filled with jealousy, intrigue, suspicion, and, alternately, triumph!” Fix began, intoning dramatically. The audience laughed along with him, but as his speech continued, it became clear that the history of Phi Beta Kappa at Williams actually was filled with all of those things and more, focused centrally around an educational rivalry between the two oldest colleges in Massachusetts—Harvard and Williams.

According to Fix, Phi Beta Kappa was originally a fraternity. “Unfortunately, Williams College banned fraternities years ago, so as members of Phi Beta Kappa, you’re all expelled,” he said. “That’s it. Congratulations. This ought to significantly shorten tomorrow’s ceremony…”

In all seriousness, though, Phi Beta Kappa was originally formed as a secret society at Williams and Mary, and it had all the attractions of one—rites of initiation, secret signs known only to members, and lots of swearing of oaths. Today, Phi Beta Kappa retains all of these features. However, the initiation is a public one, the sign of membership is the well-known key, and there is but one oath of loyalty, not to a fraternity, but to philosophy—to the love learning and wisdom. Clearly, the mission of Phi Beta Kappa has changed drastically since its inception. “So I suppose you’re all safe,” Fix said.

“At any rate, William and Mary, as the original location of Phi Beta Kappa, was vested with the power to establish new chapters, and the college chose to bestow chapters upon Harvard and Yale, along with the power to approve or veto new charters for schools in their respective states,” Fix said. And that’s where the drama really took off and how it came to be that despite being the second-oldest college in Massachusetts, Williams was the 17th chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to be established.

“Now why would that be?” Fix asked. “Well, we would have had a chapter earlier, but for the jealousy of Harvard…” According to Fix, Harvard was worried about bequests—essentially, about who would get the money left to the state for education. In a successful bid to delay the founding of Williams College, Harvard’s board of overseers wrote to the colonial government, “It cannot be thought that the means of education at another college will be near as good as at our college…”

And so it was that Williams’ founding was delayed until 1792, when the trustees of Williams College struck back at the overseers of Harvard. The Williams trustees petitioned the colonial government for a charter on the grounds that Williamstown, being an “enclosed place,” would not expose students to the kind of “temptations and allurements peculiar to seaport towns [e.g. Boston].” Williamstown was cast as an institution that would civilize the frontier and turn out moral citizens—something that held great weight for a government that was terrified by the news of rebel uprisings, as in the French Revolution and Shay’s Rebellion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the relationship between Williams and Harvard remained prickly after Williams obtained its school charter. Recall now that Harvard controlled which Massachusetts colleges could have Phi Beta Kappa chapters, so in order to found a chapter at Williams College, Williams had to send Harvard an application. Harvard responded predictably—issuing a pocket veto, refusing to vote one way or another, and thereby leaving Williams to wait indefinitely.

Eventually, though, in 1833, the stalemate was broken. Williams’ then-president, Ed Griffin told two students to go over the New York-Massachusetts border to Union College [in Albany, NY] to ask them for a charter instead. Union College replied that they didn’t have the authority to establish a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa outside of their own state, but they could issue other charters, so the Williams students came home with a charter to start a fraternity called “Kappa Alpha.” “The president saw ‘Kappa’ on a piece of paper and heartily congratulated the students on their success,” Fix reported.

But inevitably, the difference was realized, and in 1861, Williams tried again to found a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, reopening negotiations with Harvard. Finally, Harvard relented. “And as the Civil War raged, a society founded in the Revolutionary War had its inauguration at Williams College,” said Fix.

Today, only one remnant of this dramatic power struggle between Harvard and Williams over Phi Beta Kappa remains. It is on the founding document for Williams’ chapter, where the words, “Harvard University,” the chapter-granting authority, appear fourteen times larger than “Williams College.”

“So remember that Williams College struggled to have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, and honor that struggle by taking seriously your commitment to a lifelong love of philosophy,” Fix said, finishing at exactly twenty minutes, on the dot, to resounding applause.

Fleshing out that history would make for a great senior thesis. Who will write it?

Princeton, Williams College once again take top spots in U.S. News’ rankings for 2014-15

1) Every time that Williams appears in a headline like this with Princeton, the value of the Williams brand improves. It is very important that we maintain this #1 ranking, mainly for admissions, and especially for international students.

2) Kudos to Adam Falk (and everyone else at Williams) for making this happen. US News can be tricky about its methodology and the changes it makes from year-to-year. They would sell more magazines if there were more changes in the top, so maintaining a #1 ranking can be tricky.

Although the competition is tough, our most serious competitor is Amherst and they will face real headwinds given their financial constraints. Their endowment is in more trouble than ours. Their increase in enrollment will hurt the student:faculty ratio. These ranks are based on data from before the financial crash, so the Williams advantage over Amherst will only continue. Don’t be surprised if/when Amherst falls behind Swarthmore in a year or two. I also suspect that Middlebury’s recent (and deserved) rise may be in danger.

Amherst hasn’t caught us, as predicted, and Middlebury has fallen from 4th to 7th. I still think that Amherst is in danger of falling behind Swarthmore, but we need more detailed data to evaluate that.